Savannah in the Civil War |

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Savannah in the Civil War

News about Savannah in the Civil War, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. More

By JACQUELINE JONES

In January 1861, huge crowds in Savannah, Ga., greeted news of the state's secession from the Union with wild enthusiasm, and with apparent near-unanimity. Merchants, bankers, planters, politicians, religious leaders, and longshoremen-Democrats all &mdash; declared their determination to oppose the newly elected president, Abraham Lincoln, derisively termed a "Black Republican."

The following month Georgia became one of seven states to form the Confederate States of America. Together with many other white Southerners, Savannahians were convinced that once Lincoln took office he would abolish the institution of slavery, in the process rendering the South humiliated and poverty-stricken. Whites in this lush, prosperous river port of 22,000 correctly understood that any challenge to the system of human bondage profoundly threatened their way of life. The city's economy depended upon the 40 percent of the population who were enslaved workers, including teamsters and longshoremen engaged in the processing and hauling of vast quantities of lumber, rice and cotton bound for distant seaports.

The history of Civil-War era Savannah is the story of unanticipated consequences, for by their actions the Confederates initiated a conflict that accomplished what they had feared most from Lincoln. Savannah prided itself on its beautiful brick and pink-stucco townhouses, built on the backs of the enslaved field hands who labored in the nearby deadly rice swamplands; and on its hierarchical social order, which aimed to preserve the power of elite white men over all those workers, black and white, free and enslaved, immigrant and native-born, who kept the docks humming.

Yet as soon as the city began to prepare for war, the coastal trade ceased and local bankers and merchants no less than longshoremen registered the effects of a transformed economy. Over the next four years, thousands of Confederate troops flooded into the area, there to await deployment orders. Although federal forces did not capture Savannah until December, 1864, early in the war mobilization efforts disrupted the carefully calibrated social order, producing shock waves that reverberated throughout the city's elegant parlors as well as its shanty grogshops, and indeed throughout the broad swath of Georgia's coastal lowcountry.

Although Savannah was marked by extremes of wealth and poverty, it is impossible to reduce the city's population to blacks and whites, enslaved and free. Large numbers of impoverished white laborers, many of them Irish immigrants, migrated from New York City each fall to work on the docks. And throughout the region, enslaved workers and free people of color demonstrated a lively entrepreneurial impulse, seizing time to work for themselves and accumulate chickens, cattle, and cash. Despite elites' efforts to maintain "racial" distinctions, black and white laborers often worked, ate, drank, and slept with each other, mocking the caste system that was at the heart of the Confederate project.

As the disruption to trade began to be felt, enslaved workers and free people of color rushed to fill the economic vacuum left by white army volunteers and conscripts; these black people profited from the city's disorder and worked as butchers, peddlers, teamsters, and truck farmers. Other blacks fled to the coast, where the Union navy maintained a presence from the late fall of 1861 onward; for the rest of the war fugitives from slavery served as spies, boat pilots, and scouts for federal forces. Thousands joined the U. S. navy and army, eager to trade their ragged clothing for military uniforms and to fight for freedom. Over the generations, Savannah's black community had carved out a measure of independence for itself, supporting its own churches, voluntary societies, and even clandestine schools; now leaders and ordinary folk bided their time, discreetly emboldened by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. Wealthy rice planters and urban merchants of the lowcountry had long claimed that their enslaved workers were childlike, content to toil for their masters and mistresses; now, in the heat of conflict, indignant whites began to speak of blacks as "traitors" to the Confederate cause-intelligent members of the "body politic" capable of wreaking havoc on southern military strategy, and on the future of the new nation itself.

Local authorities had long controlled the black population through raw violence, and had long suppressed dissent among the poor through acts of charity and paeans to white supremacy. Now whites squabbled among themselves as strong-willed men vied for power-a series of wartime mayors; the state's governor, Joseph Brown, possessed of a states-rights streak that was as self-destructive as it was principled; successive Confederate commanders chronically bereft of adequate manpower resources; CSA President Jefferson Davis and other officials ensconced in the Confederate capital of Richmond.

Savannah Falls to Sherman

Throughout the war whites feared that the city was vulnerable to Union attack. Yet when the end came in late 1864, it originated not from the sea, but from the Georgia interior, as General William Tecumseh Sherman led his massive army southeast from Atlanta, sweeping through a largely defenseless state and entering Savannah on the morning of December 21, 1864. The night before, Confederate forces, several thousand strong, had staged an ignominious retreat across the Savannah River to South Carolina. The weary city, blacks and whites alike, rejoiced at the sight of U. S. troops marching down the Bay, the street running parallel to the river and showcasing the city's largest warehouses and merchants' offices. Truly, Sherman had liberated the city-and not only for black people, for most of the city's whites were thoroughly sick of the carnage, and of the conflict that had robbed them of so much and turned their world upside down.

Savannah and the Contemporary Press

During the war the New York Times managed to provide its readers with news from Savannah, though the paper lacked a correspondent there until the start of the Union occupation. The Times reprinted articles from local papers smuggled out of the city and transported north by Union steamers stationed along the coast. The paper also published interviews with whites who had found their way north (the Atlantic Ocean was a porous battlefront), and with fugitive slaves and army deserters, who were more than willing to provide detailed information about the city's defenses (or lack thereof). In January 1862 a PhiladelphiaBulletin reporter embedded with naval forces aboard the U. S. S. Flag gave eyewitness accounts of troop movements and coastal fortifications, articles that the Times republished. The Times also relied on news from Richmond (accessible via Washington D. C.); a paper published in Union-occupied Port Royal, South Carolina (the New South); and official military dispatches emanating from the War Department in D. C. By early January, 1865, the Times had its own correspondent on the ground, and he reported, accurately, of compliant city officials welcoming the order and stability that Union troops imposed upon the once-proud river port, now dilapidated and weed-choked. (10).

The Occupied City

Union-occupied Savannah introduced a new set of ironies. Sherman allowed the mayor's office and the city council to continue to function, and these veteran politicians provided a striking degree of continuity between the antebellum and postbellum periods. They also reacted strongly to the black men and women who sought to free themselves from white authority and at the same time become robust political actors on the local, state, and national stage. White elites proclaimed their respect for law and order, and attempted to quash the spirit of freedom among the city's freedpeople; in this reactionary effort, the former rebels found support from some unexpected quarters, including Union military officials; agents of the U. S. Freedmen's Bureau, created in March, 1865; President Andrew Johnson, who took office after Lincoln's assassination in April; and members of missionary societies hoping to convert the freed slaves from the Baptist faith to a more staid New England Congregationalism.

The mayor and city councilors skillfully manipulated political process with the help of those who retained control of Savannah workplaces, judicial system, and police force. These machinations staved off the freedpeople's struggles to achieve true citizenship-to vote, run for office, serve on juries, and live free from fear of physical brutality. It would take another one hundred years for black Savannahians to gain their basic rights, a bitter testament to the power of the white supremacist imperative and the complicity of white Northerners in supporting it.